One night, in the dead of the Canadian winter, a baseball star turned up for a workout in Etobicoke. He joined a group of local teenagers at Pro Teach Baseball, an indoor facility about 20 minutes west of Rogers Centre.

When the workout ended, the baseball star was not in a rush to leave. He lingered, and he fielded questions from both the players and their parents.

“He’s done that a bunch of times to teams that come in there,” said Denny Berni, who owns Pro Teach Baseball, and who coaches the Etobicoke Rangers. “That’s why, like I said to people, he is a superstar, but he does not act like that at all.”

Joey Votto, that star player, had played for the Rangers long before joining the Cincinnati Reds. So when Berni heard about Votto’s recent podcast appearance, in which he sounded dismissive of Canadian baseball, he didn’t think much about it: “Honestly, I thought it was a joke, really, at first.”